Snoopy Astronaut Crash Landing
How childhood defense mechanisms define our adult lives
All of us have a pivotal childhood moment, an incident of acute crisis when under extreme duress we reacted in a way that saved us from emotional annihilation. That winning strategy is hardwired into our minds and bodies, used for the rest of our lives as an effective survival technique. I remember my defining incident, and draw on its lessons to this day.
I’m a six- or seven-year-old, circa 1970–71. The Apollo Moon missions are central to the American zeitgeist, and I’m staring through the glass of a gift shop display at a foot-tall Snoopy doll wearing an astronaut’s uniform. My father Laszlo and I are waiting in a Southern California hospital to hear about my mother Marianne, recently admitted following a nervous breakdown.
We were visiting my father’s Hungarian boyhood buddy, a prankster nicknamed Majom, or “Monkey.” Both families were touristing the Sunset Strip when mom started freaking out, going mad with thirst. Quickest stop we could make was into a random taco joint, where after getting some water she paced back and forth, repeating “I need professional help!”
I remember the look on the young cashier’s face, trying to assure us — but mostly herself — that she’d just called for help, and everything would be OK. Marianne meanwhile continued to frantically pace, visibly hysterical, repeating in a crazed, endless mantra “I need professional help! I need professional help!” I was ashamed and felt somehow responsible.
Shame and guilt flipped to fear and excitement when uniformed LAPD swarmed in. They were tall and intimidating, then assuring and cool, reminding me of officers Pete and Jim from my favorite TV show, Adam-12. Appraising the scene, even the cops shrugged WTF as my mom couldn’t stop repeating she needed professional help, needed professional help…
She got it when the paramedics arrived, freaking me out when they took her away in an ambulance. Part of me was terrified I would never see her again, while another part — perhaps for the same reason — felt relief: my whole life she obsessively worried about me or completely ignored me. “Mom” was a toxic mix of asphyxiating love, and withdrawn abandonment.
The hospital waiting room is next to the gift shop, full of cars and flowers for ailing adults, and toys for sick children. Astronaut Snoopy stands defiantly on a glass shelf, just above my head, and I gape up at the doll with wonder. The black and white space suit adorned with the American flag reminds me of an inverse version of the cool cops I had seen. All I want is Snoopy Astronaut to save me.
If mother smothered me with nervous nagging or neglected me with manic self-absorption, then father provided the perfect complement of deafening silence punctuated by torrents of screaming abuse. That didn’t leave much room for conversation — so when I ask dad a dozen times if he would buy me the totemic cartoon character, he impatiently shakes his head.
“Pleeeeeeease?” I grovel. I’m fixated on Snoopy Astronaut — the doll will comfort me, its uniform will assure me, the spirit of exploration will free me. My father finally acquiesces, probably just to shut me up. My heart races as I watch the store clerk unlock the glass case and remove the toy. “Want it gift wrapped?” “No,” I nod dreamily and excitedly, arms shaking. at long last I have it now…
Snoopy plummets to the floor in slow motion, the thrill of finally possessing it overwhelming, my hands losing their grip. A snap! shatters my heart and raises the ire of my father, who picks up the figure, turns it over, points at the crack in its helmet, and stares into my being with razor-sharp contempt and derision: “Look at what you did,” he grumbles. “I got this for you, this is what you do!”
I broke everything, father fixed it. That encapsulated our relationship from busted toys to his whole life, which nose-dived after I was born when his wife fell into a postpartum depression she nor the family ever escaped. The Snoopy Incident was typical — but given how mother just publicly lost her mind I am particularly raw, this moment defining and transformative.
My parents never showed their love, and that was totally my fault. Mother was crazy and father was an asshole because I was a Bad Boy — Proof being I stood helpless as mom lost it in West Hollywood until they took her away, a feeling repeated as I stood helpless after dad bought me the best toy in the world and I wrecked it. My emotional annihilation looms: I have nowhere left to go.
I wander away from Disappointed Dad into the labyrinthine hospital. Initially I have a purpose, ostensibly to find Manic-Depressive Mom… But as I get lost I realize the farther away I get from them both, the more liberated I feel. In that moment I learn the power of escape, gain the resilience of relying on nobody, especially those who asphyxiate me with their Judgment and Anxiety…
Decades later, I still wandered randomly and purposelessly through the maze of adulthood. An anti-Theseus refusing to fight the Minotaur or accept Ariadne’s help, I gradually realized that the monsters and lovers I fled from were the roaring beasts inside my own head and heart. Living alone I was forever invulnerable — attempting nothing I never failed.
A vivid imagination and penchant for reckless rationalization filled my void. An obsession with creative fantasy and unattainable perfection protected me from banal reality and hard work. Whenever the going got tough, I got going. Astronaut Snoopy had crashed and burned, but I had survived the catastrophic accident by running away, and never returning.
I don’t remember becoming disappointed in Disappointed Dad, the shift likely happening gradually anyway. But when it did, I jettisoned with him all my natural defenses against criticism and judgment. The result made personal excellence impossible: My ridiculously high standards were self-created, and lacking an external benchmark I became my own worst critic.
Unable and then unwilling to please him, I refused to satisfy anyone else, either. Negativity became an effective shield, nothing ever good enough, especially if I did it. We all have our strengths, the brightest lights leaving the longest shadows as Jung wrote — making imperfection inevitable and even desirable. But I left no room for that, and awkwardly hid behind it.
I mirrored my father’s critical qualities, the painful irony making me even angrier and crowding my teen years with paradox: I became a young intellectual who hated school; a born storyteller who shunned the limelight; and a sentimental romantic terrified of getting laid. My father’s penetrating stare and savage rebuke kept Snoopy Astronaut grounded.
You’ll find dynamics like these in survivor families, especially between refugee fathers and their spoiled sons. I’ve met several first generation Holocaust kids with stories eerily similar to mine, their dads struggling through Hell to get their children into Heaven, and once there reminding them in every way they could of exactly what that generation endured.
The abused grown son either accepts or rejects, converges or diverges with the father’s personality and profession. I knew one kid who emulated his corporate executive dad directly into the nepotistic boardroom; another tried to out-do his father at his same game but crashed and burned; while I, as you’ve likely noticed by now, went full anti-Disappointed Dad, fuck him.
That sentiment crescendoed into estrangement around my twenty-fifth birthday, when mom committed suicide by overdosing on her psychoactive meds. Despite receiving the professional help she kept asking for, her demise was a slow burn of depression and agoraphobia: Think Leo’s mom from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape sans chain smoking and grotesque obesity.
Mother was crazy and father was an asshole — that I could handle, even if all my fault. But mother killing herself was a devastating burden too heavy to bear. A week before her suicide I called Laszlo at work, demanding an intervention. He snapped that I was disturbing him, that Marianne was always this way, I should get over it, and goddammit stop bothering him.
A week later she was dead. That was the proverbial last straw, the long overdue excuse I needed to resolutely walk away from the gift shop and wander throughout the hospital forever. With that one-two punch of death and estrangement I lost both parents, and what I thought was the soul-destroying combo of judgment and anxiety that had crushed my youth.
We all have choices. Become a card sharp, marathoner, day trader, jet pilot, or homeless vagabond. How we end up doing what we do in the way we do it has always been mysterious to me. “Talent” is a mixture of aptitude, attitude, and appetite. But which forces do we control, and which control us? If we can dream anything we want, then why do we have nightmares?
I had good reasons to hate my parents, as most kids do. Some feelings were justified, others banal expressions of my own failings — but eventually I came to the unavoidable realization that none of this mattered. Nobody ever said life is fair or we’re born surrounded by cool people. Adulthood is defined as the stubborn embrace of personal responsibility and hard work.
The night of her burial, my mother appeared to me in a dream. My bedroom was a stone crypt, lit by flaming sconces adorned with iron and bronze. I was drawn to a side chamber where she was standing in her white shawl, adjusting her mangled hair. In the flickering light she appraised herself in a warped mirror, and asked me in Hungarian, “How do I look?”
I told her she looked great. She seemed to have her doubts, so I assured her again. She nodded, smiled self-consciously, her attention drawn away. The candle flames shot up, were extinguished — and with them my burden of absorbing her anxiety and depression throughout my childhood. The calm and support she couldn’t share in her life, she at long last gave me in death.
Light to dark, happiness to sadness, we oscillate between boundaries of birth and death. My refugee parents survived the war but not each other, our family a nightmare in the country of their dreams. Fleeing the anguish, I left a stone on my mother’s grave, and didn’t speak to my father for a decade. One day I called him up, and we spoke like nothing happened.
A decade later, Laszlo would be mercifully euthanized in a hospice, his morphine drip set to fire hose. I’d played-out his deathbed scenario a hundred times over the years, variations ranging from kicking his ass to not showing up at all. When the time came I was there, sitting near him and whispering. Maybe he heard what I said, his mouth twitching.
The courtesy I could only give my mother in a dream I gave my father on his death bed. I assured Laszlo that everything was all right, said that his life was meaningful, and he should be proud. He certainly didn’t need my validation, but after enduring our broken relationship and agony of estrangement, he deserved to hear it. Snoopy Astronaut found his wings.
